tone of the Latter-Day Pamphlets, which were published in 1850, while Sibyl was written in 1845. There is, of course, more plausibility, more sonorous superficiality about Lord Beaconsfield's treatment of Chartism. Sibyl is full of such sentences as that "the mind of England is with the people," and "the future principle of English politics will seek to insure equality, not by levelling the Few, but by elevating the Many." There is more of that appearance of sympathy with the lowest orders of the State, which one who would unite the rising nobility with the People, and be himself an old Tory and a Demagogue by turns, must of necessity adopt. Yet even in the dislike of Politics, to which Carlyle sometimes gives expression (e.g., "well withdrawn from the raging inanities of politics," Shooting Niagara, p. 381), there is a curious echo of Coningsby's advice to Vere to hold himself aloof from political parties which are only factions. And when we turn from the novelist to the Prime Minister, when we think of all the recent history of Lord Beaconsfield, with his systematic disregard for Parliament, his high-handedness, his real rule over his Cabinet, and survey the picture of the one aged statesman who is a bulwark for England against "a despotism ending in a democracy, or a democracy ending in a despotism," it looks almost like the parody and caricature of Carlyle's earnest convictions of England's necessity for Heroes. This is the man whom Carlyle in Shooting Niagara called "that clever, conscious juggler whom they called Dizzy, a superlative Hebrew conjurer,' and other choice epithets. Truly the whirligig of Time brings round its revenges.

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The courses of modern history have, in truth, taught us to be on our guard against hero-statesmen. It is with them as with the Greek tyrants of old, that, borne into power by a great wave of popular feeling, their subsequent efforts are directed to repress the national energies to which they owed their rise. We can hardly help thinking of a Prince Bismarck-who in many points resembles a Carlylese Hero- with his autocracy, his cynical indifference, his parliamentary gagging bills, his protective policies. The alliance between Germany and

Austria is just such a stroke of policy as a "Real Ruler" delights in, as may be seen from the fulsome adulation of it in the mouth of that modern Elizabethan minister, Lord Salisbury. It is just such a stroke of policy also as indefinitely postpones the democratic combination of nations, and is, sooner or later, a severe blow to the democratic ideal of Commerce and Peace. It is no good news of great joy to France, at all events, who is immediately threatened ; nor yet to Russia, who is driven to seek fresh allies; nor yet to Austria herself, who may possibly find the fate of the earthenware pot floating with the vessel of brass; nor yet to England, above all, who is tossed like a shuttlecock from her natural connections with France to an unnatural combination with despotic empires, and whose commercial expansion may be severely impaired by protective Bismarckian policies. The last point has a peculiar importance in this reference, for it discloses a manifestly weak spot in Carlyle's Real Rulers. They are, in his language, to be Industrial Captains. Modern experience tends to show that whatever else a real ruler may be, he will not be an Industrial Captain. How can he be? The real ruler of Carlyle is a man who laughs to scorn Political Economy and McCroudies and other Professors of the Dismal Science; in practice, therefore, he must hold such an industrial principle as Free Trade with a singularly weak, vacillating, impotent grasp. Industrial Captain? Nay, rather a Protectionist, as befits a man of strong intuitive dislike of democratic forces—an advocate of Reciprocity, such as, hesitatingly, timidly, with many an anxious look backward and forward, our Conservative Ministers are promising to be.

Possibly we should look for our statesman-hero not in England or Germany, but in France. Gambetta is perhaps the sincerest first minister of a democracy whom we have had since the time of Pericles. He is the veritable enfant de la République, borne on a great democratic wave to supreme power, the champion of France when she was crushed inwardly by the deadening influence of the Napoleonic dynasty, and crushed outwardly by the overmastering mechan ical superiority of the German army.

He has always believed in the republican instincts of France, and she has rewarded him by making him the chief depositary of her power. He is a genuine child of the modern age, and the future will reserve one of the proudest niches in her temple for his honor. Yet Liberalism in France, in the light of recent events, wears a strange air. What is the Ideal of Liberalism? Freedom, assuredly, that every man should have personal freedom from tyranny in his thoughts, his opinions, and his form of faith. Is the Jules Ferry Bill conceived in the Liberal spirit? Is Liberalism also to persecute? It may be said, indeed, that if Liberalism is to be triumphant, it must be organized and it must be scientific; and science in the hands of a Paul Bert naturally hates Jesuitism, and organization in the hands of a Gambetta means a certain individual repression. And yet, English Liberalism, giving academic rights to Roman Catholicism, and French Liberalism putting down Jesuitism with a strong hand, form a curious and striking contrast.

It is characteristic of all great men of prophetic nature that we should have to fix their position rather negatively than positively, more by their dislikes than by their likings. Certainly in Carlyle's case the record of his dislikes forms a long series of indictments. This is his dislike of Parliament, his dislike of Statistics, his dislike of Political Economy, his dislike of Parliamentary Radicalism, his dislike of Popular Oratory, his dislike of Philanthropy toward criminals, his dislike, keenest and fiercest of all, of Democracy and Universal Suffrage.* We have left ourselves but little space to refer to all these. But it is the less nec

The following are some passages on these points, taken from Chartism (Essays, vol. v.), Latter-day Pamphlets (vol. xix.), Shooting Niag ara and After (Essays, vol. vi.), Past and Present (vol. xiii.).

PARLIAMENT.-Chartism, pp. 328, 9, 381, 2, 395, 6; Latter-day Pamphlets, 113, 134, 5, 237-40, 273; Shooting Niagara, 347, 389. STATISTICS.-Chartism, 332-337. POLITICAL ECONOMY.-Chartism, 383, 409: Latter-day Pamphlets, 53, 4, 182. PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM.-Chartism, 404, 5. POPULAR ORATORY.-Latter-day Pamphlets, 209-256. PHILANTHROPY.-Latter-day Pamphlets, 60, 61, 73-79, 82, 92-94. DEMOCRACY.-Chartism, 371-373; Latter-day Pamphlets, 18-29, 144, 158, 320-330; Past and Present, 269–274.

essary to investigate the details of Carlyle's criticisms, inasmuch as they all flow from the central doctrine which we have been examining. Given the rule of genuine leaders, and the very conditions of their appointment require them to resist all those cherished charters of popular liberty to which a Democracy or a Republic look for their ultimate establishment.

A growing disbelief in the efficiency of Parliaments is common to many theoretic politicians, who are by no means agreed on other points. We have already found it both as a theoretical and practical principle in the case of Lord Beaconsfield; and Mr. Kebbel in a recent article has pointed out that even Mr. Gladstone has given expression to discontent in this matter. It is not difficult to understand how such a feeling has grown. Every year sees the House with more work to do and less ability to get through it. Every few years see the personnel of Parliament steadily declining, and the benches filled with what Mr. Lowe has called a plutocracy and gerontocracy, to the exclusion of more intellectual elements. It would be difficult to explain the steady, mechanical majorities of the Government of the last year on any other hypothesis. And when to this we have to add that such multiform activities in matters of expenditure, of legislation, of foreign, domestic, and colonial policy, are subject to total interruption and obstruction by the fanaticism of individual members, it can be readily understood that dissatisfaction with the great Council of the Realm should be both felt and expressed. But it is one thing to reform and quite another thing to abrogate. Let us listen to the drastic remedies of Carlyle : "What England wants and will require to have, or sink in nameless anarchies, is not a Reformed Parliamentbut a Reformed Executive, or Sovereign Body of Rulers and Administrators. Not a better Talking-Apparatus, the best conceivable Talking Apparatus would do very little for us at presentbut an infinitely better Acting-Apparatus, the benefits of which would be invaluable now and henceforth. The practical question puts itself with everincreasing stringency to all English minds can we by no industry, energy,

utmost expenditure of human ingenuity and passionate invocation of the Heavens and the Earth, get to attain some twelve or ten or six men to manage the affairs of the nation in Downing Street, and the chief posts elsewhere, who are abler for the work than those we have been used to this long while?"* The remedy proposed then is not a reform of Parliament, but a great extension of power in Downing Street. And he makes an explicit proposal : "The proposal is in short that the Queen shall have power of nominating the half dozen or half score officers of the Administration, whose presence is thought necessary in Parliament, to official seats there, without reference to any constituency but her own only, which of course will mean her Prime Minister's. The soul of the project is that the Crown also have power to elect a few members to Parliament."t

This is the point in which Carlyle comes nearest to Bolingbroke and farthest from the position of Burke. The desire of Bolingbroke in his Patriot King was to further, in exactly these powers of appointing ministers, the general influences of monarchy. Burke's Present Discontents is an answer to claims of this sort. His Conservatism will not admit of any changes which disturb organically the English constitution -the inheritance, as that constitution is, of past ages of struggle, and the chosen vehicle for the expression of the public will. In other points there is much in Burke to remind us of Carlyle. He, too, pins his faith on a government by aristocracy. He, too, has a scorn for the sceptical and destructive philosophers of the eighteenth century. His denunciation of these atheists and infidels who are "the outlaws of the constitution, not of this country, but of the human race, may be paralleled by Carlyle's feeling that the last Sceptical Century" was a hideous monstrosity, with its tendency to convert the world into a steam-engine. But Burke had a delicate and profound sense of the bond of sympathetic union which unites a national constitution with all the various interacting elements of a society, and

Latter-day Pamphlets, pp. 113, 114. + Ibid, p. 138.

this is absent in Carlyle. So, too, Burke was possessed of a trust in the people which Carlyle could never feel. We could never imagine Carlyle saying, as Burke did, that in all disputes between the people and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people;" or that "he could scarcely conceive any choice the people could make to be so very mischievous, as the existence of any human force capable of resisting it." Very different in spirit is Carlyle's bitter hostility to Democracy. Democracy is to him, by the nature of it, a self-cancelling business; and gives in the long run a net result of "Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish much work beyond that same cancelling of itself." "It is, take it where you will in our Europe, but a regulated method of rebellion and abrogation." It is the consummation of No-government and Laissez-faire. A Chaos with ballotboxes Anarchy plus a street constable.

zero.

Not toward this impossibility, selfgovernment of a multitude by a multitude;' but toward some possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe struggle.”’*

It would not be easy to see more clearly than by such passages as these, how great is the chasm which divides Carlyle from a child of the modern age. Carlyle is fond of speaking of the Eternal Silences and the Immensities; the real, secret nature of Things, and the law of the Universe. These he believes to be on his side-on the side of the Real Ruler, of the aristocracy of fact, of the government by the wisest. Yet it is at least conceivable to one, who knows and feels the forces of the age and the tendency of the time, to speak of a great Democratic future as that which the Eternal Silences and Immensities ordain. Such an one may know that the experiment which has to be tried is a new one, fraught with dangers and difficulties apparently insuperable; he feels the possibility of peril, but he knows the inexorableness of Time. Go into the Future he must; try that experiment he will-because the secret nature of things points onward to Democracy, to Universal Suffrage, to the gov

* Charlism, pp. 372, 373..

ernment of a nation by itself, as an imminent and inevitable Future. It is not only the advocate of an oligarchy who can boast the Eternal Silences on his side. Yet even so, in Carlyle's treatment of this and of kindred themes, there is a quality wholly unique and incommunicable. He is the veritable Vox clamantis e deserto; his fervid imagination can convert what to the grosser eye are vacant ideals into concrete, tangible fact; his masterful grasp of the problem, combined with the range and sweep of his passionate, hysterical oratory, can carry even a man of sober judgment off his legs. It is so rare-the union of flashing, blinding eloquence with the strict and consistent treatment of the subject, so wholly overmastering the magnificent, declamatory denunciation mixed with the tender, wistful pitifulness. And there is the dramatic gift, the irony, the wonderful humor, the picturesqueness and pertinency of epithet. "Nature, when her scorn of a slave is divinest, and blazes like the blinding lightning against his slavehood, often enough flings him a bag of money, silently saying: That! away; thy doom is that. What splendid energy of utterance! Or the comparison of the British statues "rusting in the sooty rain, black and dismal,' to a set of "grisly undertakers come to bury the dead spiritualisms of mankind." Or the image of the Utilitarians, Political Economists, and Democrats, sitting as apes with their wretched blinking eyes, squatted round a fire which they cannot feed with new wood-which they say will last forever without new wood-or, alas, which they say is going out forever.'

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Who can resist such incisive imagery as this? Or to take but one other in

stance-all having been taken at random within the compass of some fifty chance pages in the Latter-Day Pamphlets

the lesson of ennui, which he draws out in the concluding pages, with its definition-" the painful cry of an impassioned heroism." The atmosphere which Carlyle makes us breathe is always healthy, stimulating, invigorating; it fills the lungs and the chest with all the life and power of a veritable inspiration; it braces the muscles with the energy of hope and cheerful resolution. He, too, like any republican politician, sees the hollowness of a policy of Imperialism. "What concern," he asks, "has the British nation with foreign. nations and their enterprises? Any concern at all, except that of handsomely keeping apart from them ?"’*

And again : The prestige of England on the Continent, I am told, is much decayed of late which is a lamentable thing to various editors; to me not. Prestige, præstigium, magical illusion-I never understood that poor England had in her good days, or cared to have, any prestige on the Continent, or elsewhere. The word was Napoleonic, expressive enough of a Grand-Napoleonic fact: better leave it on its own side of the Channel; not wanted here!"'t

And if in some parts of his political theory we find that the magnificent Idealist needs to be confronted with the diminutive personage of practice and experience; if we require to supplement the Latter-Day Pamphlets--say with Bagehot on the English Constitution, or Mill on Representative Government-we are but true to the irony of history. Prophets, in the wise arrangements of Nature, always find effective contrast in the presence of Empiricists.-Fortnightly Review.

Latter-day Pamphlets, p. 174.

Present, pp. 203-205.

Temple Bar.

ASA GRAY, one of the most eminent of living botanists, was born at Paris, Oneida County, New York, on the 18th of November, 1810. He graduated at the Fairfield Medical College in 1831, but abandoned the practice of medicine in order to devote himself to the study of botany, a branch of natural science which was at that time comparatively neglected. In 1834 he was appointed botanist to the United States Exploring Expedition, but in consequence of the long delay of that enterprise, he resigned his post in 1837. Shortly afterward he was elected Professor of Botany in the University of Michigan, but before that institution went into operation, he accepted the position of Fisher Professor of Natural History in Harvard University, entering upon his duties in 1842, and fulfilling them regularly until 1873. In the latter year he retired from active service in teaching, in order to devote himself to the charge of the herbarium of Harvard University and to scientific investigation. In 1874 he was appointed a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution in place of Professor Agassiz; and he has been for many years an associate editor of the American Journal of Science and Arts.

The following excellent summary of Professor Gray's literary and scientific work is taken from the new edition of the "American Cyclopædia:" "In his numerous writings he has shown equal ability in communicating elementary knowledge and in elucidating recondite theory. His elementary works, Ele

ments of Botany,' published in 1836, and especially his later series, How Plants Grow,' 'How Plants Behave,' Lessons in Botany,' and 'Structural and Systematic Botany' (1858), are unsurpassed in the language for precision, simplicity, perspicuity, and comprehensiveness. His labors are recorded in numerous papers contributed to the principal scientific journals and academical memoirs of the day, and in several special works.

He came forward at a time when the old artificial systems of botany were giving way before the natural system. Dr. Gray, with Dr. John Torrey, was among the first who arranged the heterogeneous assemblage of species upon the natural basis of affinity. While actively engaged in describing the new forms which were pouring in upon them from numerous explorations in our hitherto almost unknown territory, they were elaborating the accumulated knowledge of their predecessors which remained in a crude form. In 1838 Dr. Gray commenced, in conjunction with Dr. Torrey, the publication of a Flora of North America,' intended to give a thorough and comprehensive history of the botany of the country, upon the basis of the then little known natural system. This was continued as far as the end of the order composite; but as the explorations of several collectors were accumulating masses of new material from our western borders, the Flora' was suspended until this wealth of matter could be aggregated under one head. The government expeditions to the Pacific